Arts & Ideas

Critic at the Mercy of His Own Kind

By DINITIA SMITH

Published: May 24, 2003

WASHINGTON — James Wood, variously described as the most brutal, the most loathed, the most respected literary critic of his time, was struggling along the street, his body "pretzelized," as he puts it, from a muscle he pulled playing with his 2-year-old daughter, Livia.

And oh, is he vulnerable these days. As book critic for The New Republic, he has been merciless in debunking many esteemed writers of the age — Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, whose recent novel, "Fury," Mr. Wood wrote "exhausts negative superlatives."

Now, he is about to publish his own first novel, "The Book Against God" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), about a young man, Tom Bunting, the son of a country vicar, who is undergoing a crisis of faith. Tom is a chronic liar, his wife has left him, his career is a mess and he is writing, yes, a book against God.

James Wood the novelist is fair game.

"A critic writing a novel is like William Bennett in a casino," Walter Kirn, a critic and novelist, said, referring to the moralist's lively gambling habit. "All eyes are upon him."

Yet this novel is attracting even more eyes than usual. For while Mr. Wood reviews for only a small, elite audience and his criticism does not make or break books, he offers something that few other critics do: a theory against which he measures fiction. Spelled out in his 1999 book, "The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief," his theory is implicit in the term he coined for what he dislikes most about modern fiction, "hysterical realism": cartoonish characters, hyped-up prose, long lists of political and pop culture references, improbable situations, the essayistic presentation of ideas about politics and culture.

What constitutes good fiction for Mr. Wood is depth of character, the dramatization of ideas rather than authorial asides, a search for meaning rather than a postmodern nihilism — in short, what Henry James called the "palpable present-intimate." As one of the few serious literary critics writing outside rarefied scholarly journals, Mr. Wood says that he knows he is harsh but that his criticism comes from an intense love of literature.

And those who fall short of his standards provoke his ire. He has called Mr. Pynchon's characters "not human" and "serfs to allegory." It is a sign of Mr. Pynchon's "powers of evasion and self-subsidence," Mr. Wood wrote, "that few question the banality, or worse," of some of his ideas.

He accused the Nobel-prize-winning Ms. Morrison, in her novel "Paradise," of "forever rushing in sentimental garments, with no thought of the plain and awkward clothes that carry a narrative, that make its solemnities moving and not simply ridiculous."

As for John Updike: "At his worst, his prose is a harmless, puffy lyricism, a seigneurial gratuity, as if language were just a meaningless bill to a very rich man and Updike adding a lazy 10 percent tip to each sentence."

"Updike is not, I think, a great writer," Mr. Wood wrote.

So it is inevitable that the question arises whether Mr. Wood lives up to his own exacting standards.

"Everyone who reviews that book is going to be closely familiar with his first book, his approach to reading fiction," said Leon Wieseltier, Mr. Wood's editor at The New Republic. "There's no way the judgment will escape reference to his criticism."

Most writers who are primarily critics have failed as novelists. Lionel Trilling dreamed of being a fiction writer, but most of his fiction is regarded as mediocre, like his 1947 novel, "The Middle of the Journey," which is rarely read today.

When the critic James Wolcott, known for his savage reviews in Vanity Fair, published his first novel, "The Catsitters," he received some virulent criticism. Laura Miller, for one, called its main character "punishingly dull" in The New York Times Book Review.

Mr. Wolcott said in an interview, "I made it a point not to read the reviews."

Mr. Kirn has fared better. In the New York Times Book Review, Christopher Buckley called his last novel, "Up in the Air," "a truly wild ride." Mr. Kirn believes that in the end the fate of novels depends "pretty much on something close to their merits."

So far, the reviews of Mr. Wood's novel in England, where it was published in April and where reviewing can be a blood sport, have been a mixture of high praise and scorn. In one, which is particularly galling to Mr. Wood, Adam Mars-Jones wrote in The Guardian that "The Book Against God" was "fatally undramatic." Another critic wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that the book "has no core, no emotional thread to draw the reader in and make us care."

Still, Michael A. Bernstein called it in The Times Literary Supplement "anything but a critic's novel" and placed it "securely in the tradition of the British well-made comic novel." A. N. Wilson, an acclaimed novelist himself, praised its "comic realism, its warm intelligence, its lack of pretension" in The Daily Telegraph.

Mr. Wood, like Saul Bellow's Herzog, admits to fantasizing about writing letters to editors complaining about the bad reviews. "I'd happily write to Adam Mars-Jones and tell him what I think of him," Mr. Wood sighed. "But it's a fool's game."

As for the forthcoming American reviews, "I feel the usual foreboding," Mr. Wood said, "mixed with real eagerness to see what people would make of it."